Salt can have drastic effects on the growth and yield of horticultural crops; studies have estimated that salinity renders an about one-third of the world's irrigated land unsuitable for crop production.

Anti-fungal and anti-bacterial additives in house paint are present in dangerous quantities in the Vauchère river basin in the city of Lausanne, says a study to be presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco.

Amity, Pa., epicenter of the natural gas-containing geological formation known as the Marcellus Shale. Amity lies in Washington County near Anawanna, Pa. Once, home to Native Americans that named the town Anawanna, or "the path of the water," in recognition of its many rivers and streams.

Trees are dying in the Sahel, a region in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and human-caused climate change is to blame, according to a new study led by a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

While it is possible to chemically scrub carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere in order to lessen the severity of global warming, the process is prohibitively expensive for now. Best to focus on controls for coal-burning power plants, say researchers.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft analysis of data from its Pavillion, Wyo., ground water investigation. At the request of Pavillion residents, EPA began investigating water quality concerns in private drinking water wells three years ago.

Disease outbreaks are often associated with hot weather. Because many bacteria typically multiply more rapidly in warmer conditions, it's a commonly held notion that warm-weather outbreaks are a straightforward consequence of greater numbers of the microbial culprit.

A major new scientific review, involving more than 30 scientists from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands sets out our current knowledge of the impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the latest special edition of the scientific journal Pacific Conservation Biology.

Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a vast, ancient, and still active volcano. Heat pours off its underground magma chamber, and is the fuel for Yellowstone's famous features -- more than 10,000 hot springs, mud pots, terraces and geysers, including Old Faithful.

With news this week of additional radioactive leaks from Fukushima nuclear power plants, the impact on the ocean of releases of radioactivity from the plants remains unclear. But a new study by U.S. and Japanese researchers analyzes the levels of radioactivity discharged from the facility in the first four months after the accident and draws some basic conclusions about the history of contaminant releases to the ocean.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recently announced that a 3,675 square mile area of Lake Ontario is now a “no discharge zone,” which means that boats are completely banned from discharging sewage into the water.

Water discharged into lakes and rivers from municipal sewage treatment plants may contain significant concentrations of the genes that make bacteria antibiotic-resistant. That's the conclusion of a new study on a sewage treatment plant on Lake Superior in the Duluth, Minn., harbor that appears in American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science & Technology.